Monday, April 10, 2017

1980 Week: Private Benjamin

After years of sharing top
billing with male costars, Goldie Hawn finally scored a major box-office hit of
her own thanks to Private Benjamin,
the military-themed comedy that she also helped produce. Hiding a multilayered
feminist message beneath a silly farce about a Jewish American Princess
becoming a soldier, the picture has just enough substance to make up for the
paucity of laugh-out-loud jokes. And while supporting players including Armand
Assante and Eileen Brennan excel in juicy roles, Hawn‘s goofy appeal anchors
the picture. Private Benjamin is all
about the ridiculous spectacle of a tiny blonde with doe eyes running around
obstacle courses in fatigues, complaining about damage to her fingernails and
the unsatisfactory accommodations in her barracks. If there’s a major flaw in Private Benjamin, it’s that the movie lacks
a big mission that tests the title character’s mettle—essentially, the sort of
third act that was contrived for the following year’s military-themed comedy, Stripes (1981). However, Private Benjamin is only nominally about
the Armed Forces, because soldiering is just a phase the title character passes
through on the way to self-actualization.

The movie begins with a lively
wedding sequence, during which spoiled Judy Benjamin (Hawn) suffers a
surprising loss: Her brand-new husband, Yale (Albert Brooks), dies of a heart
attack during wedding-night sex. Devastated and lost, Judy meets a friendly
stranger named Jim (Harry Dean Stanton), who offers a new life filled with
adventure and luxury. By the time Judy realizes Jim is a military recruiter,
she’s fallen for his vision of Army service as an extended vacation. Basic
training sets her straight, especially when Judy clashes with stern Captain
Lewis (Eileen Brennan), but Judy soon realizes she needs to see this thing
through because she’s never accomplished anything. Her journey is complicated
when she meets dashing Frenchman Henri (Assante), so a dramatic question takes
shape: Will Judy discard her newfound sense of pride by settling back into the
narcotizing cycle of domesticity and wealth?

The script for Private Benjamin is shallow, and the
writers tend to portray men as one-dimensional ogres. (Cowriter Nancy Meyers,
later to become a rom-com titan, received her first credit—and her first Oscar
nomination—for Private Benjamin.) Yet
Private Benjamin works. The movie presents
a steady stream of lighteheated moments, some of which contain a measure of
sociopolitical resonance. Oscar-nominated Brennan makes a strong impression as
a woman succeeding in a man’s world through pure toughness, while Assante
explodes with energy and machismo, playing a special kind of dreamy jerk. Hawn
floats through it all, coming across as bubbly even when her character is
despondent, and setting the mood with her seemingly effortless comic skill and a
touch of solid dramatic acting. She was rewarded with such impressive box-office
success that a Private Benjamin TV
show soon followed. Running from 1981 to 1983, the show replaced Hawn with
Lorna Patterson, although Brennan reprised her supporting role.